


Blind Betrayal

by Arideya



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 15:10:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7512985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arideya/pseuds/Arideya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My take on Blind Betrayal that I wanted to get out of my system.<br/>Danse and F!Sole are good friends - two people that had been through a lot together. There is no romance, just one person trying to convince another that their life is worth preserving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blind Betrayal

"I want the truth. Now." Her voice was cold, every word chopped with precision of a headsman’s axe. She was pointing a 10mm to his forehead, gripping the hilt tightly with fingers covered in omnipresent dust of the road. He did not flinch, just stood still with his feet shoulder width apart, back straight, chin up, looking directly into her eyes. His own gun hung limply in his hand, and he made no move to put it up.  
She did not need to strain her arm or crane her neck to keep her eyes on level with his, they were almost the same height.  
"I am not an Institute spy.” He said as a matter of fact. “And I did not know."  
Her eyes were two slits. "Not even suspected?"  
"No.” he shook his head, expression shifting for a second to something resembling pain. “How could I? I have been fighting these things all my life. Their very nature is abhorrent to me. You should know that."  
She nodded lips pursed in a tight line “I do.” The hand gripping the gun shuddered slightly, but did not fall.  
She studied his face for a while, trying to glimpse a hint of a lie, a trick, or at least some emotion betraying the mess that must have been in his head right now, but it was blank, all she saw was quiet acceptance. "Alright." She said finally.  
"Just like that?"  
"Just like that... You are a blunt, narrow-minded asshole with a sense of humor of an old stool, but you are no liar."  
Danse turned away, a sad chuckle escaping his lips. "I do not know what is Me anymore.” His eyes moved to the worn ceiling, to watch the droplets of condensate that had formed there in peace and quiet before it was so rudely interrupted by his arrival, as if trying to search for an answer there, but finding none. When he spoke he was looking beyond her. “I no longer know who I am, I do not know if my thoughts are my own. Maybe I am lying even now. Maybe I am programmed to lie. I do not know.” He shifted his gaze back to hers. “You can’t trust the words of a synth.”  
"Maybe I can’t” She said slowly. “But I trust my gut."  
“Your gut…” He shook his head almost laughing, then stepped closer to the barrel so that his forehead almost touched it. “Enough of this. You've got what your answers now pull the trigger and let us end this madness."  
"No." She stepped back quickly, hiding the gun behind her.  
Danse frowned. "It wasn't a request, Knight. Do it. Or I will do it myself."  
"Stow it, Paladin.” Her jaw was tight. “You are in no position to give me orders.” A hand moved quickly to open the holster to drop 10mm there. “You are not killing yourself.” It made a click sound as the gun was hid securely inside. “And I am not killing a friend."  
Danse watched her face.  
"So you care?" It might have been a statement if not for the slight hint of surprise in his voice.  
"Does that surprise you?” She said flatly. “Should I have spelled it out for you, or maybe branded it on your forehead? " She gestured in front of her, tracing a large quadrilateral with her fingers, then filling it with letters one by one. "Eva cares about your sorry hide, don't get killed."  
"Cute. I was expecting you to call out on that promise."  
She sighed. "I was going to but it is unnecessary. Looks like we have a different problem here." This came suspiciously close to the end of her comfort zone, but it was necessary to spell some things out, if only for his sake.  
"Danse, I never thought I would need to say it aloud but it seems that I do.” She paused, searching for words. “I care for what happens to you. You are my friend. I am not killing you."  
He nodded. “It is understandable Eva; we have been through a lot together. But you care for a human, and I am a machine. A very thing that I was taught to despise, and a very thing that you were taught to despise. The machine was never meant to make its own decisions; it needs to be controlled. And if it can’t be controlled it needs to be destroyed. I need to be destroyed, to serve as an example, not an exception.” He stood looking at her, calm and composed, exactly like a prisoner that had accepted his execution and now was simply waiting for the headsman’s axe to fall. “I have made my decision, and you’ve had your orders. Follow them.”  
Eva stared. A thousand thoughts were running through her mind yet none felt quite right. She needed to think fast, terribly fast and she needed to think clear, now that she still had the chance. Or did she? They say that suicide is an easy way out, but they had never been more wrong. Pulling a trigger on herself was the hardest decision she had ever attempted to make, and she ended up a slobbering, trembling mess on the floor, gulping her own bogies and weeping like mad. So how did you deal with someone who had already crossed that line? How did you convince to live someone who had already decided to cease their existence?  
"Danse… from where I am standing you are still you…” She began carefully. “Nothing’s changed. You are still Paladin Danse, a loyal member of the Brotherhood. You had put your life on the line for its beliefs, bled for it. And now you want to kill yourself for being that something that the Brotherhood despises. If that is not the proof that you are still yourself… Well, I do not know what is. Besides…” She was mulling over the words in her mind, thinking how to proceed and to better express what she meant. He will call her out on her bullshit of course, but what could she do. To her these arguments seemed solid, even if they went against some of the core Brotherhood convictions that Danse had absorbed into his very bones. Well if there was a time to test how far their differences went, this was it. She had to try everything.  
“…Besides” She continued to speak in a slow calm tone as if explaining to a child. “You might be a machine, but you are no different than a human being, only with a slightly different composition. Yes, you may have some parts inside of you that are made of plastic and metal instead of flesh and bones, but it doesn't matter. You are as human as myself."  
As she suspected his face darkened and for a moment and he was the same old Danse that had put her in line back at the Concord Police Station.  
“Synths are nothing like humans, Eva, don’t be ridiculous.” Now he was talking to her as if to a child. “They are machines that act on programming. They have no self-identity other than what was implanted into them by someone else. You can’t treat them the same as humans. They aren’t and they will never be. What you are saying is treason. They need to be destroyed.”  
“If I had followed all Brotherhood tenets we wouldn’t be talking.” She snapped.  
“We wouldn’t be talking if not for Haylen.”  
“True, but she trusted me to find you. Call me a hypocrite if you wish, but I had never compromised Brotherhood’s actions regardless of my personal beliefs.” Arguments were important, she was grasping for straws. “Look at Nick, he has a strong identity, he isn’t going on a murderous rampage and he is a much more machine than you are.”  
Danse had to roll his eyes. “Nick’s identity is not his own, he has memories of a dead detective. He was made in the lab. He is a pathetic imitation of life and a great example of technology gone wrong, he shouldn’t exist either. And you shouldn’t be defending him.”  
Eva was shaking her head. “No, no, no. I am not asking you to forget Brotherhood’s beliefs in an instant, but please trust me on this one - think what makes you a you? When do your memories end and your identity begins? Is it your cumulative life experience that influences your current sentience? Or your current awareness of your being? Your decisions now are based on your internal concepts of right and wrong. Does it matter whether you had lived all those previous experiences to receive these concepts? How can you decide which one is allowed to exist and which one isn’t? Both cases are experiencing the current state of ‘I am’ but each gained it differently. Nick may have memories of a detective, but the actions he performs are made by the Nick whose brain is a mass of wires.” She watched him, the question hung in the air between them. Danse was silent, not looking very convinced. For a while he did not answer, just stood there, thinking.  
“So to you the awareness matters?”  
“Yes. I do not know how you got your personality but you are sentient and you are aware, your decisions are made by the current you, not… past… whatever.”  
“But if you did not live through these experiences, they were implanted in you. Does that not bother you? All my past experience may be artificial. Who knows what other commands were input in my brain? I may think I am following Brotherhood’s ideals, but I may still be a danger, what if I go insane, start murdering everyone?” he paused. “Kill you."  
She ignored the last point. “But you do that don’t you, just not with humans.” She said sardonically. “Still, we all already come pre-programmed, humans, ghouls, animals, synths, just by different means. Back in… pre-war… I have read about these. The free will is an illusion. Humans are pre-programmed from their very birth. Our brains make decisions before our internal ‘I’ does. We think the decision is ours, but it is not, everything we do is guided by the program evolution had put into us, even something as simple as raising an arm to shield our eyes from the sun. Human brain has electric current running through its neurons. Synth brain looks to have the same electric current, it just flows through a different material. Or maybe Gen 3 brain is fully organic, who knows. In any case I see no difference between how my brain works and how yours does, or between my program and yours.”  
“That wasn’t the point I was making. Even if all this…” He swiped his hand encompassing her earlier tirade. “Is not just a pseudo-scientific rant of a mad 200-year-old woman. What if I turn on you?”  
“Humans can turn on each other too, madness is not uncommon, and I doubt it works that way. If you get a short-circuit I can always grant you a bullet in the brain that you wanted so much.” He did not look convinced. She sighed. “Danse, I trust you implicitly. You helped me, taught me to survive and brought me into an organization that placed an entire well-equipped army at my back. We have fought and bled together and not even once had you misplaced my trust. And I am not the only one. Haylen cares about you, and there are other brothers and sisters who looked up to you, who remembered your actions and loyalty. You are not alone in this."  
Danse looked down at his own gun as if he forgot it was there. "Perhaps. I seemed to have focused on my own problem and forgot how it would affect you and others. I should have realized."  
"Well now you do." Eva ran a hand through her hair. It was draining. She wiped her face with her hands, massaging the eyelids with the tips of her fingers. The gesture had left a trail of dust on her eyes and she blinked several times to clear her vision. "Listen” her voice cracked a little. “This is all very difficult. I cannot pretend that I understand how you feel, to say otherwise would be a lie, neither am I going to fall on my knees and beg you not to die, to do so would be selfish.” Taking a couple of deep breaths, she continued.  
“I am not turning my back on you no matter what. Killing you will be a betrayal of my own beliefs. I believe you have no reasons not to exist and I gave you all the arguments why. The Brotherhood thinks otherwise. But in the end you are the one who will be living with this burden, not me, not Haylen, not Maxson, you will bear the knowledge and the consequences of it. Maybe it is selfish of me not to pull the trigger, but that is my decision. So if you had made yours, you will have to do it yourself.”  
She pulled her gun out of the holster, bent down and placed it before him.  
"I am leaving my gun here” She said, “Then I go to the surface and wait outside for twenty minutes with my back turned. You have three options. One – you act on your decision, I go back to Maxson and report to him that you are dead. This place becomes your grave. Two – you don’t act on your decision, leave and take my gun with you, two guns are better than one, you leave the Commonwealth never to return. I go back to Maxson and report that you are dead. Either way I will never see you again."  
"And the third option?" he picked the gun, slowly turning it over in his hands.  
She shrugged. "You return me my gun yourself. The rest is up to you. I’d prefer to have it back, but it’s not fatal.” She looked at him pointedly. “And now I am calling you out on that promise. If you still need a reason to exist and you find none, then remember this - my child, my boy was taken by the Institute. If you stay to fulfill that promise you will have an option to prove to yourself that the Institute holds no control over you, that you are your own man."  
She turned away quickly, hiding her face in the shadows, and walked towards the door. She stopped at the entrance as if remembering something. “Maxson asked for your holotags as proof, thankfully he didn’t ask for your head. I need them regardless of your choice."  
Danse nodded and unzipped the collar of his jumpsuit, then produced the holotags and tossed them to her. Eva caught them, squeezing them in her palm. They were warm to the touch, retaining some of his body heat.  
“You are committing treason on my behalf.” He said.  
She looked down at her fist. “Let us worry about one bad decision at a time, okay?” With that she stepped into the elevator.

She stumbled out of the building as if drunk, nearly suffocating from the suddenly stale air inside. Her head swam. She reached for the wall for support, but touched it with the hand that clutched the holotags, the fist slipped on the hard concrete and drew blood. She did not notice the pain, opening her mouth like a fish, to gulp the air hungrily as a dehydrated traveler drains the last drops from his water skin.  
She was only now aware of the sweat that trickled down her back and on her brow, of the incessant pounding of blood in her temples, of the cold that settled in her fingers and threatened to creep up her arms. She steadied herself and looked at her hands, they were shaking spastically. The knuckles of her first turned corpse white from exhausted pressure, below the thin trails of blood ran down her scratched fingers. She was meant to clean the wounds and bandage them to avoid festering - it was very easy to catch something if you were not careful - but she only shrugged it off, turned her hand and uncurled the already stiffening fingers to stare at the sweaty palm beneath. It seemed that she had gripped the holotags so hard that they left large red creases on her skin, and the dust on her fingers had mixed with the sweat to cover the tags with dirty splotches. Faint blue light peaked from behind the grime, several letters could be seen on the tiny display. She did not have to read them to fully to understand the words – Paladin Danse. Unwittingly her other hand had moved to their ancient counterparts hanging around her neck. Feeling the cool metal with her fingertips she traced the engraved letters slowly, almost gently. As the letters took on recognizable form her eyes snapped open. She shook her head, wiping the treacherous moisture that had formed suddenly on her lower eyelids. Had she done enough?  
She had seen a large chunk of armature caked with cement on her way in and had decided to make it her waiting porch. She hobbled to it, slumping on the rough surface, the weapons cluttering around her. She did not seem to care, her eyes were locked on the Pip-Boy and the time it showed. 18:35. Twenty minutes she said. Twenty minutes to change a life. So it should be 18:55 when it all ends… She breathed in, set the time, and fixed her wide unseeing eyes on the weathered horizon. Regardless there was nothing more she could do.

She waited, a lone figure hunched on the large concrete block among the dusty rubble of the old military post. She looked like a large bird, bleak tatters of her long coat spread around her like torn wings, the shadow behind her growing larger as the sun had entered its slow fall towards the horizon. There was no sound, no wind and no movement.  
The seconds ticked, followed by minutes. One, two, three…. Five. Time was insistent on flowing painfully slow. Only twenty minutes, but it felt as if an entire life was passing before her eyes. Memories appeared on her retinas, and were gone as quickly, she paid them no mind. She was staring at the horizon but was not seeing it. She was thinking, yet could not remember what. Dried earth, barren trees, burnt grass, the things that had before dragged her into despair now seemed only meaningless shadows on the edge of her blurry vision. Her only movement was the fall of her eyelids to moisturize the quickly-drying eyes.  
A loud high-pitched sound pulled her out of reverie, and she looked at the Pip-boy. She had set it to alert thirty seconds prior to the end. It was 18:54:30. Only thirty seconds to go. Her eyes watched the numbers change. 31, 32, 33, ….. 45, 46, 47….. 56, 57, 58, 59…  
18:55 flashed on the screen, green light burning her eyes. She held her breath. Nothing. No sound, no movement. Nothing. She shut her eyes, the time branded on the back of her eyelids, and waited until all she could see was darkness. Opening her eyes, she took a heavy breath, lungs stretching painfully under the pressure. So be it. If it was how it should be, she will honor it. There will be a time to grieve later. Now she needed to get back to Prydwen and report on the deed. 

She was contemplating the long trek, when something squeezed her shoulder gently. She turned her head as if in a dream to look at a large hand laying there, but not really seeing it, then raised her eyes. Danse stood next to her holding her trusty 10mm. “I believe you wanted it back.” he said simply.  
She nodded slowly. “I am attached to it, yes, it’s good to have it back… and it is good to see you well… as well... ugh”  
He smiled slightly, “I am not in the habit of backing out on my promises.”  
“So it seems.” She stood up, taking the gun from him. The tension had started to dissipate from her body.  
“I have one condition though.” He added.  
“Yes?”  
“When you take on the Institute I have to be there.”  
She thought about it. “Yes of course, but you can’t be seen by any of the Brotherhood. We’ll have to think of a way to disguise you.”  
“Naturally.” He nodded. “I owe you a big one”  
She laughed, the sound more a neurotic bark than anything remotely human. “I owe you at least twenty. I need to start to make it up sometime.”  
“I can write off ten if it will make you feel better.”  
“Only ten? That’s cheap.”  
“Well, I have nowhere to go so I might call on these favors.” His face turned serious and he looked at her strangely. “Thank you.” He said after a long pause.  
“I’ve got your back.” She nodded, not taking her eyes off his.  
“I know. I will need time to digest everything and… start adjusting to the new way of things.”  
“You can’t stay here. If Haylen knows about this place someone else might too. Speaking of – what shall I tell her?”  
“It is your head now, do whatever you feel best.”  
“Alright.” She looked him over. The bright orange fabric of the BOS uniform immediately jumped at her vision, a perfect target to for a sniper’s scope. She frowned. “You need to find different clothes too; these look incredibly inconspicuous.”  
Surprised, Danse looked down at his jumpsuit. Strange how neither of them had noticed it before. “You’re right” he muttered. “I will find something.”  
“Okay.” Eva tightened the straps on her equipment. “I’m off to tell Maxson a big fat lie. Let’s hope he is not psychic and will not execute me on the spot. If I am still breathing, I’ll be in the Goodneighbour getting filthy drunk.” The necessary lie was now weighing heavily on her shoulders. She desperately needed a drink. “Hancock is going to love it I’m sure.”  
Danse gave her the look, “Just don’t let that ghoul coerce you into something you might regret later.”  
“Nah, booze should be enough.” She adjusted her backpack with rigid hands. “I’ll be there when you’re ready.”  
“Good. I’ll find you.”


End file.
